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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 2 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

a return to the Estimates Committee reviewing the suite of annual reports in total, allowing any member of the Assembly to join the Estimates Committee when they feel it appropriate or when the matter under discussion is relevant to their area of interest or contains some matter on which they wish to discover further information.

The committee would like to see the Chief Minister's Department annual report include some discussion about the number of consultancies that have been conducted and the amount of outsourcing that has occurred. We think the evidence is now starting to show, in the results we have seen in annual reports, that we are losing something in terms of public administration. We are losing a continuity of knowledge. We have a pretty glib presentation at the surface - and that pervades the annual reports - but underneath that there seems to be not a lot of improvement in public administration as it affects people.

The committee would like to see the Government report to the Assembly on strategic partnership services that we pay very substantial sums for. In fact, we have, amongst others, a strategic partnership with Fujitsu. We spend a lot of money with that company, and that is one of the companies we have also made considerable concessions to under our business incentive scheme. We think there needs to be more in annual reports about the benefits that have accrued from the considerable amount of money the Government has spent on consultancy and strategic partnerships.

As I said earlier, we would like to see the Government quantify the impact on human capital within the Assembly of the loss of in-house capacity. I do not think it is any coincidence that we have a fairly strong drive towards outsourcing and reliance on consultants and have seen many failures and, unfortunately as a result of all that, a number of senior public servants being pushed out of the government lifeboat as it meanders.

We recognise that annual reports are reports on activities cast in the best light. We would like to think that, if we are going to have this diverse process of annual reports being examined by different standing committees, some effort is made within the Government to embrace a philosophy which says an annual report is to inform, as opposed to casting the Government in the best light.

In many cases it was only through the committee asking questions, and maybe even some happy accidents, or a word or two said in the hearings, that we were given some indication that what is in the annual report is not the whole picture. Quite often we did not think an item looked too bad - let us say it was expenditure on legal fees for some individual - only to discover when asking a question about it that not only was there that level of expenditure but there was also a considerable level of commitment in that financial year which implied and made inevitable a far greater level of expense. But there was nothing in the annual report to indicate that. I think the Government needs to look at accounting standards in relation to a requirement to account for commitments made as well as expenditures already recognised.

Within the report there are a few recommendations that relate to further information. I will not labour those. I will just mention a couple that we are interested in. The ACT business incentive scheme obviously requires a greater degree of accountability. If one looks through the annual report at the promise of jobs that were going to be created by

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